Less than a year and a half after California's historic recall election, Sacramento's wastelands are littered with the bleached bones of legislators and pundits who, unable to move beyond a cliche-ridden dismissal of a bodybuilder-movie-star-turned-governor, have underestimated the raw intelligence and honed intellect of the Austrian immigrant at California's helm.
To examine the intellect of Arnold Schwarzenegger is to seek to discern the influences that have shaped -- and continue to shape, however obliquely -- his thinking, which is to say his mind. Let's begin with a necessary distinction between intelligence and intellect.
Intelligence is a biologically based ability to understand, to get it. Intellect (and here I guide myself by sources as diverse as Thomas Aquinas and Jacques Barzun) is the formation of intelligence by culture, society, education and experience. Mind is intellect aware of itself.
Those who know Schwarzenegger -- and I know him a bit -- can attest to the man's complexity. He might play Conan the Barbarian and the Terminator, and these roles, properly probed, might very well reveal aspects of his subconscious. But his resemblance to Conan or the Terminator in real life is skin-deep. The inner Schwarzenegger is a complex, highly intelligent and intuitive Euro-American with a sense of history and an informed taste for late medieval Austrian woodcarvings and 20th century Mexican art, as well as motorcycles and fine cigars.
As I see it, four basic forces shaped Schwarzenegger's mind:
(1) A commitment to self-instruction, linked to confidence in an individual's capacity to discern for himself and suspicion of received wisdom and business as usual.
(2) A preference for direct democracy (even if it takes celebrity status to energize that democracy).
(3) The idea of reform, as linked to history, destiny and the ideal of "the champion."
(4) A paradoxical blend of free-market economics with a residual Euro-Catholic respect for government as social democracy and safety net.
In the novel "Moby Dick," Ishmael tells us that a whaling ship was his Harvard and his Yale. Schwarzenegger might say the same thing about Gold's Gym. Like so many notable Americans in fiction, fact and fusions thereof, Schwarzenegger is a product of self-invention, springing like F. Scott Fitzgerald's Jay Gatsby from a Platonic conception of himself.
